From the very moment of the liberation of camps at Auschwitz, Belsen and Buchenwald, Germans have been held accountable for the crimes committed in the Holocaust. The Nazi regime unleashed the most systematic attempt in history to wipe out an entire people, murdering men, women and children for the simple 'crime' of being Jewish. After the war ended in 1945, the Jewish State of Israel was created and Jewish communities were re-established in a now divided Germany. Germans have engaged actively with their Nazi legacy and the Jewish communities have remained and grown stronger, but neo-Nazism has also persisted. Young Germans have learned the horrific deeds of the past at school, and throughout the world, people of all nations have tried to learn the lesson 'never again', while Germany has become 'Israel's best friend in Europe'. Pol O Dochartaigh analyses the ways in which Germans and Jews alike have attempted to come to terms with the Holocaust and its terrible legacy. He also looks at efforts to remember - and to forget - the Holocaust, movement towards recompense and reparation, and the survival of anti-Semitism.

Essays analyzing postwar literary, cultural, and historical representations of "good Germans" during the Second World War and the Nazi period. In the aftermath of the Second World War, both the allied occupying powers and the nascent German authorities sought Germans whose record during the war and the Nazi period could serve as a counterpoint to the notion of Germans asevil. That search has never really stopped. In the past few years, we have witnessed a burgeoning of cultural representations of this "other" kind of Third Reich citizen - the "good German" - as opposed to the committed Nazi or genocidal maniac. Such representations have highlighted individuals' choices in favor of dissenting behavior, moral truth, or at the very least civil disobedience. The "good German's" counterhegemonic practice cannot negate or contradict the barbaric reality of Hitler's Germany, but reflects a value system based on humanity and an "other" ideal community. This volume of new essays explores postwar and recent representations of "good Germans" during the Third Reich, analyzing the logic of moral behavior, cultural and moral relativism, and social conformity found in them. It thus draws together discussions of the function and reception of "Good Germans" in Germany and abroad. Contributors: Eoin Bourke, Manuel Braganca, Maeve Cooke, Kevin De Ornellas, Sabine Egger, Joachim Fischer, Coman Hamilton, Jon Hughes, Karina von Lindeiner-Strasky, Alexandra Ludewig, Pol O Dochartaigh, Christiane Schoenfeld, Matthias Uecker. Pol O Dochartaigh is Professor of German and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. Christiane Schoenfeld is Senior Lecturer in German and Head of the Department of German Studies at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick.

From the very moment of the liberation of camps at Auschwitz, Belsen and Buchenwald, Germans have been held accountable for the crimes committed in the Holocaust. The Nazi regime unleashed the most systematic attempt in history to wipe out an entire people, murdering men, women and children for the simple 'crime' of being Jewish. After the war ended in 1945, the Jewish State of Israel was created and Jewish communities were re-established in a now divided Germany. Germans have engaged actively with their Nazi legacy and the Jewish communities have remained and grown stronger, but neo-Nazism has also persisted. Young Germans have learned the horrific deeds of the past at school, and throughout the world, people of all nations have tried to learn the lesson 'never again', while Germany has become 'Israel's best friend in Europe'. Pol O Dochartaigh analyses the ways in which Germans and Jews alike have attempted to come to terms with the Holocaust and its terrible legacy. He also looks at efforts to remember - and to forget - the Holocaust, movement towards recompense and reparation, and the survival of anti-Semitism.

Julius Pokorny (1887-1970) was the foremost Celtic scholar of his generation on the European mainland. Born in Prague, he studied at Vienna University, and learned Irish in Mayo and Kerry. He was a German nationalist who also became a propagandist for both the Gaelic League and the Irish nationalist cause from 1908. In 1920 he succeeded Kuno Meyer as professor of Celtic Philology in Berlin. Douglas Hyde, Eoin MacNeill, Myles Dillon and Liam S. Gogan were counted among his friends in Ireland, while in addition Osborn Bergin and T.F. O'Rahilly were among his contemporaries in Celtic scholarship. He translated Pearse, O Conaire and An Seabhac into German, and he is mentioned by name in poetry by Bergin and Flann O'Brien; he is mentioned in Joyce's Ulysses, in which the belief that the ancient Celts had no concept of hell is attributed to him. In 1935 Pokorny lost his Berlin professorship because the Nazis discovered that, though he was a Catholic, his grandparents had all been Jewish. He led an uncertain existence in Berlin until, in 1943, he fled to Switzerland. The Swiss admitted him because he possessed an Irish visa, issued in 1940 in Berlin on the instructions of de Valera, at the instigation of Hyde. From then he taught Celtic at Zurich and Berne Universities and, after 1955, was Honorary Professor of Celtic at Munich University. This book examines the main issues surrounding Pokorny's life, including assimilationist Jewry in fin-de-siecle Austria, German involvement in Celtic scholarship and Irish nationalism, mythology in Joyce's Ulysses, Nazi anti-Semitism vis-a-vis Jewish German nationalists, Irish and Swiss attitudes to refugees, and the value of Pokorny's scholarship. It is a tight but comprehensive study based largely on original documents and correspondence that have been discovered by the author in Austria and Switzerland, as well as material from national archives in Vienna, Berlin, Berne and Dublin.